Librarianship and Human Rights

In this book, the reader will encounter a myriad of urgent library and information voices reflecting contemporary local, national, and transnational calls to action on conflicts generated by failures to acknowledge human rights, by struggles for recognition and representation, by social exclusion, and the library institution’s role therein. These voices infuse library and information work worldwide into social movements and the global discourse of human rights, they depict library and information workers as political actors, they offer some new possibilities for strategies of resistance, and they challenge networks of control. This book’s approach to library and information work is grounded in practical, critical, and emancipatory terms; social action is a central pattern. This book is conceived as a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change. This book, for example, locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts. The strategies for social action worldwide documented in this book were selected because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice.

"…a necessary, important and long-overdue book."—SHINE Journal

"This is by far the best book I have read on librarianship for a very long time."—John Pateman, Head of Libraries, Learning and Inclusion, Lincolnshire County Council

"Inspiring, affirming, activating, energizing, I ran out of superlatives to describe this book. If you are a library worker who wants to change the world, read it today – because tomorrow may already be too late."—John Pateman, Head of Libraries, Learning and Inclusion, Lincolnshire County Council